USB Audio won't work

[waltztempo]

Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit OS...

I re-installed Win 7 after a couple of HDD problems. I have an external USB digital-to-analog converter which interfaces to a little stereo system. I played music via USB from Media Monkey. After the Win 7 re-install, the USB audio wouldn't work at all. It's recognized by the OS, but no sound at all, including system sounds.

I verified that the USB DAC and stereo are fine, because I can play music through it via USB from a Dell Mini9 laptop (Win XP). So, the problem has to be my Win 7 setup.

I opened the Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Device Manager page, and expanded the Sound, Video and Game Controllers section... ATI HD audio device, Realtek HD Audio, and USB Audio Device are present. I disabled the ATI and Realtek devices. No help.

The speaker icon next to the system clock has a little red "x" next to it. When I right-click on the red x, and choose Playback Devices from the pop-up menu, I see the USB DAC listed as the only playback device. It has a green check next to it and the notation that it is the default device. The properties page says it is enabled.

When I hover the mouse pointer on the speaker icon, the pop-up message states that there is no audio output device installed. When I left-click on the speaker icon on the taskbar, the Windows sound troubleshooter starts and displays the message: Enable device - Enable Realtek HD device.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Steven

 

[TrainableMan]

Best guess, since you did a reinstall you are likely missing some needed drivers or settings.

Did software (likely a DVD) come with your USB sound device? If it did I suggest you try running that.

Also you might Go to Control Panel>Device Manager and select View>Hidden Devices and look for any unknown devices (yellow icon). If you see any, that is likely what you need to install.

If none of that helps you might also try the Microsoft Fix-it for sound.

NOTE: I believe part of the Microsoft fix-it is that this program may turn on "treat recommended updates the same as critical updates" and I highly recommend disabling that setting in control panel>windows updates. This allows windows updates to include driver updates, which is fine when it works, but if you accidently get a driver you should not have then it can cause issues. It is better that you periodically run Windows Update manually and you install "recommended updates" after reading the descriptions and doing some research to see if they really are something you want on your computer.